Government regulations have been established for several years related to various safety standards. The automobile industry must meet such standards set by the Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration related to crash worthiness. Therefore all such vehicles are subjected to crash testing wherein rigid test procedures and conditions are set forth in government standards and regulations.
Anthropomorphic dummies are employed in auto crash testing and include sensitive instrumentation to measure the forces to which the dummy is subjected to during such tests. The data obtained is used to assess human occupant safety.
For many years, piezoresistive accelerometers have been mounted within the dummies to measure such forces within very rigid specifications associated with assuring that reliable data is obtained.
In view of the extreme abuse necessarily involved in such crash testing, it is not unusual that the instrumentation associated with recording these forces may fail. Such failure requires a re-run of the test which involves the destruction of another new auto. In many instances, a single failure of one of many sensors or its connections with recording equipment requires that the test be re-run.
Of course such re-runs are very costly, therefore, any reduction of the likelihood of causes of such failures is very important. As related to the sensitive instrumentation and recording of data measured by accelerometers, this problem has not been satisfactorily solved prior to the present invention by those skilled in this art.